Our Week in the Forest...

Our penultimate week of holiday camp has been a great one and it makes us so happy to hear how much some of our campers have enjoyed their time with us. This week activities have been varied and plentiful and when you add in a little 3-year-old imagination it’s always exciting to see what unfolds.

Over the weekend, our camp (but more importantly stash of tepee sticks) had been discovered! What we arrived to however, was so exciting. A new den had been built in our camp and this formed the basis for most of the role play throughout the week. Having helped to build smaller structures over the last couple of weeks, the children excitedly offered suggestions for how to improve this one. ‘We need more long sticks’, ‘we need rope to tie them together’, ‘we need to cover it in bracken’. Clearly if left stranded on an island our two, three and four-year olds would probably last longer than most of us! Throughout the week this shelter has acted as many different things; rocket ships, a house for the little pigs to hide from the big bad wolf, a castle, and sometimes just a normal house with a normal family cooking a normal meal. What has been fantastic though is how through the use of their imaginations the children have been transported into whatever scenario they think up, developing their communication, reasoning, problem solving and creativity along the way.

We have also had a number of treasure hunts in the forest this week. Numbers 1 to 10 were written in mud on some of the trees around our base camp. The children were then given a special ‘ticket’ with a number on it and told to match it with a tree. If they could correctly tell an educator which tree they found the number on, they were given a second special ticket. For our holiday campers, this was a great way of exploring the whole site, familiarising themselves with where our rainbow ribbons were and the different areas we set up each day. For our regular Little Forest Folk-ers, they loved racing around the site, trying to collect as many tickets as possible.

Christy has been bringing her camera into the forest (you may have been able to tell over the last couple of weeks with some amazing photos in our newsletters), and this has intrigued the children on a daily basis. The children are used to seeing educators with their work phones to take wonderful snaps, however, the DSLR was a completely new piece of kit for them to (very carefully under close adult supervision!) explore. The children soon learnt they had to look though the viewfinder until they saw the desired picture, then click the button before looking at it on the screen. Some of the older children enjoyed twisting the lens to focus or zoom and were made to feel just like pirates looking through a telescope.